Local Pages

DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION

We aspire to a work culture in which diversity is integral, evident and valued for the benefits it brings us. Our business’ ongoing success is rooted in maintaining a truly diverse workforce, where every employee is respected, included, engaged and fully contributing.

​​​​​​​​​​​​​​The Diversity and Inclusion Panel

During 2017, our Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) Panel – a representative group made up of 19 men and women from across Tetra Pak - conducted a qualitative and quantitative review of our company's performance on diversity and inclusion issues.​

They articulated the following business case for increasing diversity and inclusion at Tetra Pak:​​

​A competitive advantage: Strengthening our customer value proposition by offering a diverse team with perspectives that match the evolving needs of our customers and consumers

A talent advantage: Maximising our performance by widening our access to talent, creating an environment where everyone is engaged and performs at their best​​

A decision-making advantage: Leveraging the power of diverse perspectives and experiences to unlock creativity and performance; challenging ourselves to think and act differently.

Our desired future state

With this business case in mind, we created a ‘desired future state’, which describes a respectful and inclusive work environment, company-wide engagement and dialogue around diversity and its value, and an organisation whose diversity reflects our business and consumers.

We have put in place a detailed baseline that will allow us to monitor our progress as we implement our action plan. Our work will focus on increasing flexible working arrangements, manager training, training around career development and increasing the focus on diversity and inclusion in our talent review and recruiting process. We will also improve how we communicate around these issues both internally and externally.

​Our strengths and weaknesses

The Diversity and Inclusion panel’s performance review helped us identify areas of strength and opportunity across our business.

Our strengths include a positive culture of empowerment and collaboration, good scores on engagement and a strong mix of nationalities across all levels of our business. When it comes to gender issues, we hire and promote women well at management level and maintain strong investment in women in development programs.​

Our opportunities for change include increasing transparency in our career development process and improving access to networks and work-life programmes. We need to hire and develop more women below management level and increase the percentage of women at senior management level.

Moving from Defining to Implementing

In 2018, we moved from defining our Diversity and Inclusion strategy to implementing it. Here are a few highlights of the results:

The number of women at senior leadership level rose from 10 to 14 percent, and women at management level rise from 23 to 24 percent. This is a significant increase in a short amount of time.

We have doubled the reach of our flexible working policy. Flexible working is now available in all countries around the world where Tetra Pak employs more than 50 people.

We now provide Diversity and Inclusivity training to all leaders. We launched a course on inclusive leadership which is being offered to all leaders in during 2019.

Looking ahead, we have put plans in place for further improvements in 2019. Each executive team member now has plans to close the gaps in their organisation, most of which were focused on improving gender representation at leadership level. ​

Balanced gender representation

We want our business to keep progressing towards balanced gender representation as quickly as possible. At the end of 2018, for the fifth year running, 22 percent of our employees (24 percent of middle managers) were women.

Our Diversity and Inclusion panel defined the key needs to increase gender diversity, reviewed and critiqued current people processes and their gender focus, outlined best practices, provided input to the Global Leadership Team around barriers to women, and became visible ambassadors for women across Tetra Pak. We are still struggling to hire as many female graduates as we would like – the talent pools is scarce. More needs to be done to interest girls in science.

Our new action plan for diversity and inclusion will help us step up and tackle this problem with fresh focus in the months and years ahead. In particular, we remain objective, transparent and proactive when it comes to increasing the number of female future leaders. This is embedded within our talent review process, which is based on ability and potential, above all other attributes. As a first step, we expanded our future talent program to include interns – all geographies are now also hiring interns, and in 2019 we also want to show more female role models to break down some of the perceptions around women in technical roles​